Microsoft’s Windows Movie Maker
Quick and Fast: Fairly basic and can be slow at times. Believe it or not, as free video editing programs go, this is one of the best!
Where to get it: Automatically comes with Windows XP Service Packs 2 and 3 and a newer (better?) version comes with Vista. You can also get it from Microsoft’s website.
I found Movie Maker to be VERY slow. The playback and refresh rate after making even a trim goes like molasses! Playback is jumpy and the video slowly gets behind the audio. Very frustrating. I used to think that your video quality was worse after editing, since Movie Maker seemed to suck the life out of my footage. I have since discovered that this is only if you render to WMV (Windows Media Video) format. Rendering to AVI leaves your video in roughly the same quality and gives you an attractive black letter box on top and bottom. Nice! (Note: Movie Maker has several render presets. Most are WMV, but at least one is called DV-AVI. That’s the one you want.)
EDIT: I’ve since learned the hard way that the DV-AVI file isn’t really a normal AVI file, but more like a DV file. What I do now is render a High Quality WMV (640 x 480 aspect ratio) and then convert it, using Any Video Converter (see Any Video Converter’s chapter in the Converters and Conveditors section).
When it comes to graphics (titles/credits), your choices are pretty limited other than color, font and basic animations. Sadly, this is better than what you get with most other free video programs. I’d really like to be able to put the titles anywhere in the frame I want rather than always being in the center. Many transitions, effects and title animations are plain useless both aesthetically and when it comes to rendering/playback. Even basic little dissolves cause Movie Maker pain in the RAM playback area. Also, the copy on my laptop sometimes freezes up and I have to quit and start over. This just means you have to save often.
There are good points however. Movie Maker is what I started editing with originally. It seems to be the best all around trainer for newbie video editors and if you start with it, Sony Vegas is A LOT easier to learn. There are a lot of similarities with Vegas: drag-and-drop, one view screen, audio waveforms automatically shown, etc. There are also some similarities with Final Cut Pro: the Collections area is like the Browser in Final Cut.
Also, Movie Maker has a little known, but nevertheless useful function where you can stop on a frame and save the frame as an image. This is common with pro editors, but seemed to be rare with free ones. I used this function one time and it saved me.
EDIT: This is actually more common than I thought at the time. Even the Conveditors can save a frame as a photo.
Also, you have only one audio track, but then your video track also has audio with it, so this is almost a 2nd track…almost. In order to use this effectively however, you would have to edit out all unnecessary audio from your camera (see demo below).
With all of it’s quirks, Windows Movie Maker is still a fairly good video editor.
Rehansplit: There’s this website called Rehansplit that has some wild transitions for Movie Maker. Now, transitions are where you can get into trouble. I use just cuts, dissolves and fades. I haven’t used these, and even more transitions for Movie Maker seems kind of a waste. But they might work with other software; if you’re interested, you can go Here.
Tutorials: These are also on Microsoft’s website, but there’s some good ones on lynda.com too which I recommend checking out. NOTE: You’ll have to pay to watch all of them. The Movie Maker Help file is also good.
License and Use: All the sites I’ve found say the license is “Free”. Microsoft allows you to distribute Movie Maker as long as you have the copyright to go with it. It doesn’t say you can’t make commercial projects with it. Many of you will be saying “Ah, c’mon! Movie Maker?!?” Well, why not?
Demo: This chapter’s demo is the epitome of what you’ll get if you aren’t careful. I did the Rough Cut for my 7th short film, Earthling. Because Movie Maker is so slow, I couldn’t see exactly where I was cutting, so sorry, but the cuts are off. You’ll want to allow enough time for the edit process with Movie Maker. I also did some dissolves with the music and video so you can see what you’ll get. The audio feature I mentioned above about your camera audio being available as a 2nd audio track is also shown, but of course, as I mentioned, you have to shoot only what you want, so you’ll hear me talking, which is NOT good and won’t be in the finished film. This is only the video and there will be a TON of 3D animation and compositing, so it doesn’t look like much. I was hoping to finish the film over Thanksgiving 2008, but December’s here and I’m not done yet.
EDIT: March 2009 is here and I’m STILL not done. Earthling will be out by April 2009.
